Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Acceleration)

Perplexity; New York (NY); Híbrido; USD 250 000 - 405 000; Tempo integral

Resumo da oferta

Perplexity AI is seeking experienced engineers to join the Acceleration team, driving order-of-magnitude improvements in product and user experience through AI-enabled workflows. This role blends AI product development, infrastructure engineering, and developer experience to push velocity and impact across the company.

Ideal candidates bring deep internet-scale experience, fluency with Python, and enthusiasm for learning Rust/TypeScript/Go, with a track record of delivering prototypes and

Qualificações

• 5 to 15+ years of industry experience in infrastructure/platform engineering or developer acceleration.
• Daily use of AI models/tools with intuition on their jagged frontiers.
• Proficiency with Python, with willingness to learn Rust, TypeScript, Go.

Responsabilidades

• Identify and execute high-potential opportunities to accelerate delivery with frontier AI capabilities.
• Collaborate across disciplines to harness AI in new ways.
• Make codebases, systems, and knowledge legible to AI.
• Help optimize quality-velocity frontier for maximum performance.
• Stay current with new AI tools/models and set an example in their use.

Conhecimentos

Python

Rust

TypeScript

Go

AI tools

CUDA

Ferramentas

CUDA

Descrição da oferta de emprego

About Perplexity AI

Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine built to serve the world’s curiosity with fast, trustworthy answers grounded in the live web and backed by clear citations. It combines multiple leading models with real-time search to synthesize up-to-date, source-linked responses instead of traditional search results. On top of this foundation, Perplexity is rolling out Computer, a general-purpose AI worker that can use software like a human to research, build, and execute end-to-end workflows for users.

About The Role

Perplexity is seeking creative, AI-pilled engineers to join our Acceleration team. Our company is reshaping the way people navigate the internet and the wider world. The Acceleration team's mandate is to continually up-level the way our company and our teams operate, to deliver order-of-magnitude improvements in product and user experience.

Just as Perplexity is heralding an agentic future for the internet, you will ensure that our company makes the best use of AI tools and agents to multiply the leverage of our lean, mission-focused teams. Today, Perplexity uses AI tools across everything we do, from frontend and backend engineering to applied AI research and business operations. Tomorrow’s AI technology will be even more capable, and the Acceleration team will lead both software and process engineering to harness AI so that the company can deliver at maximum velocity.

The ideal candidate will possess sound technical judgment forged in the trenches of internet-scale companies, paired with voracious use of today’s most advanced AI tools/models and a capacious imagination to rethink how work gets done in the leading companies of tomorrow. They should thrive in a hybrid role that marries facets of AI product development, infrastructure/platform engineering, developer experience, and more.

Key Responsibilities

• Identify, prioritize, and execute on the highest-potential opportunities to accelerate Perplexity’s delivery cadence with frontier AI capabilities.
• Develop empathy for the nuances of our technical and business teams’ work across disciplines and verticals, toward collaborating with them to harness AI in new ways.
• Make our codebases, systems, and knowledge stores legible to AI.
• Help the company triangulate toward the optimal point on the quality-velocity Pareto frontier, while shifting that frontier outward with AI tools and agents.
• Keep abreast of new AI tools/models and make maximally effective use of them in your own work, setting an example across the company and inspiring others to do the same.
• Help the company make high-conviction bets on specific technologies in situations where indecision is a comfortable and tempting default.
• Work with engineering leadership, recruiting, and others to ensure we instill an AI-forward culture and select for those who will thrive in such an environment.

Note: this is an extremely technical and hands-on role. Strong vision and creativity is necessary but not sufficient for success. You will be expected to build both prototypes and production systems, as well as to reengineer our codebases, infrastructure, processes, and anything else that must evolve to realize this vision.

Qualifications

• 5 to 15+ years of industry experience, ideally with a substantial portion focused on infrastructure/platform engineering or developer acceleration in environments featuring significant technical complexity.
• Daily use of AI models/tools, along with strong intuition on their jagged frontiers.
• Proficiency with Python, along with experience and/or desire to learn more about Rust, TypeScript, Go, and other languages.
• Strong understanding of (and empathy for) the work of technical staff across disciplines, along with an enthusiasm to learn about the work of business and operations teams.
• Broad working knowledge of the typical stacks used by AI product & applied research companies. (For example: you don’t need to have experience hand-rolling CUDA kernels, but you should know what CUDA is and when/where/why it’s used.)
• An obsession with improving the legibility of (and reducing brittleness in) both software and human-orchestrated processes.
• Experience navigating tricky exploration-exploitation tradeoffs, balancing the need to ship today with the need to build capacity for tomorrow.

If you’re excited about this role, we encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn’t match every qualification listed above.

Compensation Range: $250K - $405K